I couldn’t believe I said that. The number of times I’d worked an active crime scene and watched a paramedic toss a wallet or handbag onto the victim’s lap as they wheeled them out the door on a stretcher. There was nothing more frustrating for an emergency room doctor or nurse than having no idea who the person they were working on was. Russell was looking at me now like I might be having a brain aneurysm, wondering if he was going to have to call a second set of paramedics for me. ‘The paramedics who took her out,’ he said slowly. ‘They’d have—’
‘Grabbed it while they were wheeling her away.’ I put a hand up. ‘I know.’
‘I’d bet my bottom dollar there was a handbag,’ Russell said. ‘If the killer doesn’t have it, it’ll be with the body. If we’re lucky enough, it’ll have the notebook in it.’
‘Right,’ I said, cringing at how impressed I sounded.
‘So what’s with the laptop and notebook, then? What is she?’ Russell asked, staring at me. ‘A writer? A journalist? A researcher?’
‘How would I know?’
‘You were here before me, Evan.’
‘I was herethirty secondsbefore you, Russell.’
‘How long did you want, exactly?’ my brother asked. ‘How long would it have taken for you to look at this situation and figure out that whoever this girl is, she’s been carefully and deliberately targeted for her electronics and her notebook? How long would it have taken for that hard-won epiphany to percolate in your thick skull, gradually brewing into the miraculous realisation that your very next move should be to google who the hell the victim actually is and what she does for a living?’
‘More than thirty seconds.’ I pinched the bridge of my nose. He was so much like Dad it was shocking. The way he spoke. The facial expressions. I wanted to say it, knowing how angry it would make him. ‘I’ll google her now.’
‘Forget it. I’ll do it. I wouldn’t want you to sprain a neuron. Try to pass this intelligence test instead: where’s the nearest coffee?’
‘Ah, I reckon Dodge and his team would be using the cafe on the corner there,’ I said miserably. ‘Aside from the pub, that’s the only option in town.’
‘Go get them to set up an urn and put it in the beer garden. We’ll create a base of operations out there, where everyone in town can see us working.’ Russell went back into the room’s small bathroom.
‘You’re not honestly putting me oncoffeeduties?’ I asked the empty room. ‘I’m the second in charge by rank.’
‘Are you still here?’ Russell barked.
RUSSELL
Ineeded air. There was a time when I could walk into a crime scene and put everything together into a nice complex story, vacuuming up all the details, stirring them around in my brain and spitting out an initial theory, and then I could move straight onto the next step of the investigation without taking a breath. But the mental effort required to look with hard eyes at the room where Chloe Lutz had been murdered and put together some undercooked ideas about what had happened, all while confronting my brother for the first time in five years, left me numb and jittery. I walked back out to the landing at the top of the stairs and came upon the crime scene photographer, who was hovering at the railing, fiddling with the knobs on her tripod and trying to look anywhere but at me. Word was obviously getting around that I was a world-class arsehole, which gave me some comfort. But I’d blown out all Prick Energy at Dodge and Evan, so I told her gently and politely what I wanted from the scene shoot and then went down the stairs and out to the front of the pub.
Bridie was sitting on a low sandstone wall across the street, messing with her phone. I came and sat beside her.
‘Your uncle Evan is here,’ I said.
She put her phone down. ‘Oh … wow.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I thought he was further out.’
‘He is.’
Bridie chewed her lips and looked at me. I was trying not to remember the last time I had seen Evan. We’d been sparring with each other in a doorway then, too. The doorway of my house in Eastwood. The crime scene of my murdered marriage. ‘You guys aren’t going to work together on this, are you?’
‘No,’ I said firmly.
‘You’d better not. You’ll strangle him, and then there’ll be another murder to investigate.’
I wanted to smile at the joke but didn’t have the strength. ‘He’ll be hanging around, though.’
‘So should I, uh …’ Bridie picked up her phone again. Just held it to her chest, the teenager’s comfort teddy. ‘If I see him, should I not talk to him?’
‘You’re an adult, Bridie. You can decide who you talk to.’
She looked surprised. ‘Oh. Okay.’
